Like a dirty peasant, a serf, like a stupid bus conductor, like a wounded and rotting soldier, I spit in the face of all those who threaten our pride, the last refuge from all this, by nurturing our dreams that cannot but push us even deeper in the same old mud of centuries, millennia… I spit in the face of all the spinners of great expectations, and I abdicate. I retreat behind the anachronism of pride that my intelligence burdens me with. There is simply nothing out there but an animal entrusted with an over-extended brain, an instrument of survival beyond survival. True, there is also progress: indifferent, dull, glacier-like… It leads nowhere, it wants nothing, it stands for nothing. Like dinosaurs we progress toward the day when our eggs will fail to hatch.

Even high up in the mountains there is nothing but this. This and only this. Like an over-confident reptile I spit proudly in my own face, dancing ever so slightly on the surface of the deep black mountain lake.

Addendum (October 21, 2016)

One more time, I am delighted by my own words penned so many years ago. Thirty-six, to be exact. I was thirty-four at the time. And I am delighted by my closeness with Nietzsche, which has not only survived but also blossomed by now. Indeed, now we are like brothers. Returning to the piece itself, I spit in the face of all the spinners of great expectations once again. Having abdicated for the very last time earlier this year, when I was blessed with liberation at long last, I have nothing more to say. For all their glory, showy words can go only so far. Earsplitting silence is the most powerful coda of them all.

Footnote

1. Cf. F.W. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1967, p. 50:

One is deceived every time one expects “progress” from an ideal; every time so far the victory of the ideal has meant a retrograde movement.

Christianity, the revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth; all these big words have value only in a fight, as flags: not as realities but as showy words for something quite different (indeed, opposite!).